World Congress on Pain throws up a few gems

I have just been in Montreal for the World Congress on Pain – numerous presentations and about 1600 posters. It is the posters I really like – can be intimidating but there are always a few gems. Here is some preliminary work that I thought was interesting and which is relevant to work that our group is aiming to do with Mike Farrel and Kim Bennel from Melbourne Uni and Frank Keefe (who would be SIR Frank Keefe if he was on the other side of the pond) from Duke in the USA: “Imaging response to CBT in individuals with chronic pain” by Magdalena Naylor and her mates from the University of Vermont. They showed patients, and healthy controls, photos of negative, positive or neutral events and related brain activation to pain, coping and depression scores. The photos have been used to bits – they are called the IAPS photo set.

It is an interesting design because it is not investigating noxious stimuli, but generally aversive stimuli. In short, they found that after an 11 weeks coping skills training programme, patients with chronic pain showed less activation of the amygdala and increased activation of the insula, when viewing negative pictures and interpreted this as evidence that the coping skills programme resulted in greater inhibition of the amygdala by the insula. This strikes me as intuitively attractive, although the design clearly does not control for anything – I am sure the authors would agree. So, we cannot really conclude that the training programme did this, but we can use this information as justification for getting some money to find out.

One issue to consider on this front is the possible differences for people with chronic pain between body-part specific threatening stimuli, like photographs of a knife going into the hand, or the hand getting mashed in a meat slicer (both of these photos are in the IAPS set), and generally threatening stimuli, like photographs of a bus exploding or a scarey-looking man (also in the set). We had a visit from Stefaan Van Damme (who I saw last week and it is possible that he and Geert Crombez actually look younger every time I see them – something fishy going on there in Belgium) when I was in Oxford and we showed different effects of specific and general threat on prioritisation of tactile and auditory input – go here.

Regardless, it is great to see researchers across the globe starting to take on the challenge of investigating the mechanisms involved when these cognitive strategies modulate pain.

Are you young with CRPS? We need your help!

Young people with CRPS and parents/caregivers are needed for research being conducted at Bath University

The study involves asking young people (14-25 years) with CRPS and parents of young people with CRPS to complete a 20-25 online survey which asks them to think about their future. Study recruitment is being conducted separately for both young people and parents. Please email crpsstories@bath.ac.uk if you would like to take part. Participants will be paid for their time.

PainAdelaide 2019

For you interstaters / internationallers – it is the day after Womad so combine a trip to the Festival City with one of the world’s truly great music festivals. Put it in your diary and we will let you know as soon as registration is up and running.

It’s impossible to slip your disc!

Lorimer Moseley answering the question “What is the thing that annoys you most when we talk about back pain?”

Online survey on bodily changes, sensations, and mood in people with chronic pain

How do CRPS and other chronic pain conditions affect bodily functions, sensations, and mood? Help CRPS researcher Janet Bultitude find out by responding to her survey.

The survey is aimed at people with CRPS, people with chronic pain conditions other than CRPS, and people without any chronic pain condition. The survey takes approximately 20 minutes and the responses are anonymous.

Prof Paul Hodges on pain and altered movement

Am I safe to move?

Listen to Lorimer Moseley talk to Karim Khan on new understanding of pain and focusing on the patient.

Understanding Pain

Regular physical activity is important for our health and well-being. Recent evidence suggests that independent of being physically active, limiting the duration of sedentary behavior, such as sitting or lying down, is important to reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and all-cause mortality (Biswas et al. 2015). Advances in wearable sensors provide a […]

We don’t normally have to think about our breathing and that’s because breathing is handled by a subconscious part of the brain called the medulla. The medulla automatically controls our breathing as well as our heart rate and blood pressure (Del Negro et al. 2018). It sends neural signals to the breathing muscles to activate them […]

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All blog posts should be attributed to their author, not to BodyInMind. That is, BodyInMind wants authors to say what they really think, not what they think BodyInMind thinks they should think. Think about that!

We aim to facilitate and disseminate good clinical science research. We love comments that engage with the research and are constructive and respectful. We do not prescribe treatments. Promotion of your particular therapy in the comments section is not appropriate here either - that is not the point of BiM. Finally, all the comments that are made reflect the views of the person who made them and are not endorsed by BiM or members of the BiM research group.